米の日本帝国内分業と外米依存の構造

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Analysis of Japan's rice policy after the Meiji Restoration is crucial to an understanding of Japan's prewar economic growth and its colonial management of Taiwan and Korea. However, despite the importance of this topic, research so far has failed to provide a consistent line of logic and empirical evidence to show how Japan's domestic demand for rice was met by imports of rice, both externally from the wider Asian rice market, and internally from its own colonies. It has been often argued that agriculture in Japan stagnated in the 1920s, and that hyperinflation caused by World War I aggravated shortages and led to the violent rice riots of 1918. The Japanese authorities are therefore said to have developed a policy of increasing rice production through designating Taiwan and Korea as rice-supply bases for the home country. This paper argues that neither the available data nor theoretical considerations support the idea that Japanese agriculture stagnated during the 1920s and, therefore challenges the common interpretation of the relationship between Japanese rice policy and its colonial management. The empirical findings of this paper imply the following conclusions: (1) rice production in Japan did not stagnate during the 1920s, (2) farmers both in Japan and its colonies behaved rationally with respect to economic incentives, and (3) its was rice imports from the colonies which affected (in the sense of Granger causality) the level of rice production in Japan, rather than vice versa. That is, the behavior of farmers both in Japan and in its colonies can be explained in terms of economically rational motivation, and their attempts to take advantage of different sets of economic opportunities and constraints created by the division of rice production in the Japanese Empire.
社会経済史学会の論文
1999-03-25

著者

中嶋航一
帝塚山大学経済学部

米の日本帝国内分業と外米依存の構造

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